Managing your Intellectual Property

As an author, you do not have to surrender all of your copyrights when you publish. Having a fuller understanding of copyrights can help you manage your intellectual effort and bring a balance to the world of scholarly publishing by bringing the interests of publishers in line with your interests and the university's interests. Here are some basic points to understand about copyright:

Copyright is a bundle of rights. They can be transferred in their entirety to a third-party (such as a publisher) or separated. Copyrights include the right to produce and sell or distribute copies of the work, to perform or display the work publicly, and to adapt or create derivative works.

You do not have to surrender your copyrights when you publish, though traditionally with academic writing, publishers have required the transfer of all copyrights as a condition of publication.

Transferring all copyrights to a publisher can have unintended consequences. For example, you may not be able to photocopy your own writing in a course packet or in e-reserves without permission of the publisher.

Giving all copyrights to the publisher also confers enormous market power on the publisher, since they become the exclusive owners of the author's work. Libraries and universities struggle with the issues (e.g. licensing, high costs) of obtaining access to journals and information which are controlled by publishers, who often have a strong incentive and profit motive to limit access to information.

It falls to individual faculty members to manage their copyrights in ways that foster their own professional and academic goals and interests.

Most often, Appalachian State University faculty are interested in retaining their rights to:

Reuse their work in teaching, future publications, and similar professional activities.

Post their work on the web, either in a repository such as NC Docks; a disciplinary archive such as PubMed Central or arXiv; or on their own website.

For More Information

Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum[1] to secure your rights as the author of a journal article

Creative Commons[2], a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works